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Sam A. Myers, Veteran Advance Man, Recovering From Heart Attack

By Jackie Calmes March 10, 2012 10:20 pmMarch 10, 2012 10:20 pm

Doug Mills/The New York TimesVice President Biden’s trip director, Sam Myers Sr. right, shown here with his son, Sam Myers Jr., who works for Education Secretary Arne Duncan, at a ceremony for the National Teacher of the Year in May 2011.

Sam A. Myers, well known in Washington as the advance man shepherding Democratic presidents, vice presidents and presidential candidates through their many trips, foreign and domestic, was receiving get-well wishes on Saturday from his current and former charges as he recovered from a major heart attack.

Now the trip director for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Myers had returned with Mr. Biden from Honduras late Wednesday and was awakened on Thursday morning by a call from his son, he recounted in an e-mail. “Had he not called, I might have died in my sleep,” Mr. Myers wrote.

Feeling “a burning in my chest like nothing I had ever felt before,” Mr. Myers called the White House physician, who called ahead to a cardiologist at George Washington University Hospital, blocks away from the White House. Mr. Myers’s son drove him there. A doctor determined that Mr. Myers was in the midst of a heart attack, his lower ventricle fully blocked of blood flow, and rushed him into surgery.

By Saturday, Mr. Myers had heard from Mr. Biden, President Obama and Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, for whom he was the director of the trip advance team during the Clinton administration. Mr. Myers, 61, also worked for former Senator John Edwards during his unsuccessful bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, and for former Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.

“I have quite a bit of damage to my heart but I’m told with the proper medicine, diet and exercise I will regain most of it,” Mr. Myers wrote in the e-mail. “I thank God,” he added.

The job of director of trip advance is one of the toughest jobs in the White House, its occupant responsible for the myriad minute-to-minute travel arrangements for everyone from the president to the reporters who follow him. The director gets blame when anything goes wrong, but rarely credit when trips go well. He has to keep the president or vice president briefed on where to go, what to do and whom to greet.

Yet Mr. Myers is “really calm under pressure, really calm,” said Marcia Hale, director of scheduling and advance for Mr. Clinton. “If Sam was in charge, I always knew everything was going to be fine.”

Among reporters, photographers and film crews, Mr. Myers is known – and popular — for regularly acquiring souvenir caps from local sports teams or businesses at the places they visit.

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